The Army looks to build a drone marketplace; DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge reveals winning models

The Army will be creating a marketplace to better match drones with units based on their requirements. With so many vendors providing a variety of unmanned aerial systems, it can be difficult for formations to determine if certain systems will in fact meet their needs. Col. Danielle Medaglia, project manager for UAS at program executive office for aviation, shared details about the new initiative during a recent teleconference, saying it is meant to ensure drones products do what they advertise they can do, along with confirming NDAA compliance and other specs. The forthcoming marketplace is part of the drone revolution occurring within the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a directive last month on “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance,” which sought to improve how the department develops and employs small UAS. That directive calls for every squad to be equipped with low-cost, expendable drones by the end of 2026. Army offiicals called the new marketplace and approach a “fundamental shift” in how traditional acquisition is conducted. The goal is to get systems into the hands of troops as quickly as possible. The Pentagon’s two-year public competition to spur the development of cyber-reasoning systems that use large language models to autonomously find and patch vulnerabilities in open-source software concluded Friday with $8.5 million awarded to three teams of security specialists at DEF CON. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s AI Cyber Challenge seeks to address a persistent bottleneck in cybersecurity — patching vulnerabilities before they are discovered or exploited by would-be attackers. DARPA Director Stephen Winchell said: “We’re living in a world right now that has ancient digital scaffolding that’s holding everything up. A lot of the code bases, a lot of the languages, a lot of the ways we do business, and everything we’ve built on top of it has all incurred huge technical debt… It is a problem that is beyond human scale.” The seven semifinalists that earned their spot out of 90 teams convened at last year’s DEF CON were scored against their models’ ability to quickly, accurately and successfully identify and generate patches for synthetic vulnerabilities across 54 million lines of code. The models discovered 77% of the vulnerabilities presented in the final scoring round and patched 61% of those synthetic defects at an average speed of 45 minutes, the competition organizers said. The models also discovered 18 real zero-day vulnerabilities, including six in the C programming language and 12 in Java codebases. The teams’ models patched none of the C codebase zero-days, but automatically patched 11 of the Java zero-days, according to the final results shared Friday. Team Atlanta took the first-place prize of $4 million, Trail of Bits won second place and $3 million in prize money, and Theori ranked third, taking home $1.5 million. The competition’s organizers allocated an additional $1.4 million in prize money for participants who can demonstrate when their technology is deployed into critical infrastructure. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.